Knowledge pool bridging

A cross-department sharing & empathy building session

Even in a small company, specialization can lead to fragmentation. Marketing and sales bring people in, product gets them onboard, user success deals with problems and requests, developers deal with bug reports, BI puts customers in buckets or cohorts, business comes with new ideas and events. Each department has their own pool of knowledge and experience with the company’s customers.

(knowledge) pools about to be united

In order to bridge the gaps and help build a shared understanding of the customers, I recently mediated a cross-department mind-melt session. I designed the questions with the additional goal of increasing empathy towards customers, and to find new, meaningful ways to improve their experience with the company and product.

Findings

1. Expressing emotions from the customer’s perspective: hard. Easier to slip into voicing judging statements.
2. Being curious, open and understanding? Easier with people that you haven’t been interacting with.
3. Everyone found something new.

I’ll talk more about each of these findings soon, but let’s dive a bit into what we did, and how.

Structure

In the first part of the session, we created a simple map of the customer’s journey:

The pattern we found is: they start from having a generic need, which becomes articulated as a more specific need, that the product promises to fulfill. So they become customers, and after the setup and an initial adjustment period,

• some of them become active, involved and evolving
• others become passive, with minimum effort and investment.

Then, for each of these phases, we answered the following questions:

• what does this person want and need?
• what do they know, what information or beliefs do the hold?
• what positive emotions do they feel?
• what negative emotions do they feel?
• what actions do they perform?
• what actions they don’t perform?*

I asked that the answers had to be backed up by past and present reality: things that customers did, said or asked, or things that the participants recall having observed while interacting with customers.

Crowd management

We worked through each state of the customer journey, one question at a time. To prevent vocal, extroverted types from dominating the discussion, and to gather everyone’s input, I asked to start in silence, by writing individually, on a separate post-it, each answer they wanted to share. As we were about 15 people working on this, we found that it wasn’t practical to share after each question, nor could one easily hold their post-its for all the questions. Soon we settled into the rhythm of

• everyone write down, individually, answers for two questions: (what needs and information?), (what positive and negative emotions?) (what actions they perform or don’t perform?)
• after each couple of questions, share the post-its by placing them on the whiteboard and reading them out loud (questions allowed, negativity forbidden)
• extra: allow some time for sharing more answers or anecdotes spurred by what was being said by the others.

And back to findings

The easy

It was a lot easier that I expected to get people into a contributing, sharing vibe. Even though it took quite a long time to finish (2 sessions x 2 hours), we mapped the whole journey and got more than 200 insights.

The hard

It was quite hard to stay in an empathic, curious and open mindset. To counter the tendency to express facts in a judgemental manner, I asked everyone to write down their observations in first person, as if they were the customer. It was interesting to observe that this was, in general,

• easier to do for facts than for emotions;
• easier for positive emotions than for negative ones.

(At times I felt like a foreign language teacher, hearing a “they…” statement and asking: and how do you phrase that as an “I” statement? And patiently waiting for the answer, as even voicing an answer in first person requires the effort of empathically be “in-your-place“.)

Another thing that I had to counter-balance was the temptation to use the what actions do they perform? question to slip in what they should do and they don’t do answers (= judgment). To keep the what actions do they perform? section clean, I added the last question, that was not present in my initial plan: what actions they do not perform?*

The expected

As I expected, everyone found out at least one new thing; even those that were sure they already know everything about everyone. :)

The unexpected

I was surprised to notice that, for most of the participants, it was easier to be curious and understanding about the customers they were not dealing with directly or frequently. At least in this session, it looked like empathy is directly proportional with distance. An idea to be explored further.

What happens next?

At least: a more cohesive approach towards customers, and more empathy.

Hopefully: working together to present the product in a more natural way for the customer’s mindset and needs, improving the communication and product as the generate more positive emotions and less negative ones, and to guide the customers into performing the actions that keep them engaged and growing.

Credits: I was inspired to explore, and to focus on empathy, in the Design Thinking workshop by DesignThinkingSociety. Also there I learned the power of “first write down individually, than share in an open, accepting environment”.